Tag Archives: Money

Journal , , 1 Comment

Some Words I Typed

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What am I even fucking doing today? I don’t know, y’all. I been trying to make this shit more readable, but I don’t even give a fuck right now. I’m sitting in bed with cat hair all over me. I got this hoodie from American Giant or something like that.

Morgan left the house to go out and play basketball. I didn’t see it coming but I’m ready for this dude to be out of my house. I remember when I lived with my other brother, and that got bad enough I think and he had his own room. This dude is just living in the living room. Playing the newest Kid Cudi album while we’re looking for a place for him to live. Took up all morning again. Then I’m washing mad dishes. I don’t even give a fuck about washing dishes these days. I’m all about it. Not like the old days. But damn. Life is off kilter.

It doesn’t even really matter, I guess.

I’m trying to help him pay all his bills and shit on time. Looks like I’m going to have to figure out which bills can wait after all. He can’t make money fast enough. Shit I’m sleepy, too. I’m bout to take a nap, fuck it. Least I can go to work refreshed.

“It’s so chill,” said the girl. But it’s different now.

Correspondence , , , , , , 2 Comments

Correspondence 22.03.17

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From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Wednesday, March 22, 2016 at 12:36 PM
Subject: The twisty sounds of piano-fortes long forgotten

Oi mate, you ever been to a deli? It’s a place with a counter. Maybe there’s some weird rolled chopped animals hanging from the ceiling, they might be caked in white rocks from the ocean. In the deli sometimes there’s a red machine that you pull a ticket from and it has a long number on it and eventually someone will yell out one of the numbers on the ticket and boom it’s time to order your boiled pigs and processed simulated cow’s milk product.

If you look at the digits of a year, 2017 for example, in a certain way, you can see that it’s kind of like that ticket from the deli. You pull one out, you throw it away, you hope you got everything you needed.

What I been doing at The New York? I been doing it to death, my friend.

I used to think: I better not post every day; I don’t want people to have to read every thought that comes into my head; eventually they will get tired of me and unfollow.

You know what, I don’t know at all what people feel. What I do know is that search engine traffic comes from content content content. You can game the system, and I wish I knew how, but if I increase the amount of content on my blog, I figure someone is bound to look at this shit and give me a million dollars.

In 2017 I have not worried about the fact that I’m obsessed with money. I have given up on the dream of a utopian society, of having Tescos. Every empire falls at some point, all I care about is having enough reading material to ride out the apocalypse, and as long as I have one good book, I’ve got that.

I suspect that the more dreams you give up the more you know which ones actually even matter at all. Sure, you can think too small, but you can certainly think too much, and I have found so far that it is better to think nothing at all than to think big some days and on other days berate yourself for not thinking big.

I’m fighting with my cat to type this, and it’s cute like, “oh he wants to type things, too!” but I also can’t fucking focus for one fucking minute god dammit it’s like I have a kid or something. I play with this mother fucker all the time shit I love him but then I try to pet him just now and he bites me. He wants what he wants all of the damn time and that is it. The only time he’s nice to me is when he’s half asleep. If he was a human that’d be a fucked up and very common relationship.

I’m writing all of the time now writing writing writing I just love writing and maybe if I post enough times all over the damn place maybe I can just keep writing. I’m revising a story a little at a time and letting it take its course. Fuck it, you know? But people love to say that. And it’s pretty meaningless. Fuck what? I don’t know.

I know you’re not writing as much these days because you are a more complete person than you were before, but I miss your writing nevertheless. Don’t feel guilty, I don’t know how that makes you feel, but I wouldn’t want to feel guilty about making you feel guilty.

Ha! Feelings! Fuck ’em.

Love ya

G

From: Babe <listenotothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Friday, September 9 at 11:00 AM
Subject: 21 days with no incident

It is ten o’clock where I am, at a cafe, on an island down south, where a Thai cook is watching television, having already prepared my breakfast. It is low season, and in the course of the day, I am the only one he will see. Perhaps I will pass by again in the afternoon, for tea and to read my novel. I am reading John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor, which is intriguing though not quite as intoxicating as The Little Drummer Girl, which remains my favourite.

It rains lightly in the morning before the sun punches a hole in the storm clouds in the early afternoon. In the evening, strong rain and winds frustrate the hotel’s efforts to provide al fresco dining. This is a pattern that repeats itself the entire time I am here. I am not bothered. It is perfect weather for someone convalescing. While this is a short jaunt– a mere five nights– it is still the longest I’ve been away from home. Two days I’ve been on the island and the vastness of my horizon makes me almost seasick.

I want to read your brown leather book. It’s barenaked and shows straight through to the bone like a leper dead six hours in a pool with a distracted piranha. Ha. That’s brilliant. I could never write properly by hand, but I like my typewriter. I ran out of ribbon though, and as I don’t know where to get things that nobody buys anymore, I may have to resort to Amazon.

***

I started this email on the island and now I’m back in Bangkok, and my pores are clogged up with pollution too. I feel my leaves slowly curl up around me. I have never liked living in cities, it has always been something of a necessity. I need to be located near a bookstore. Yet I am contemplating packing my life into boxes, moving into a smaller place in Bangkok, and going on the road again. Living out of a suitcase two months at a time. Why? The world has gone mad, have you noticed?

You must be lost somewhere in Asia by now. Are you intoxicated by the alien life?

B.

P.S.

I can’t conceive of distances either.

 

Journal, Writing , , , , 3 Comments

Three Hours of Typing / Twenty Minutes of Writing

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My new routine is get up, do chores, sit in front of the computer for four hours organizing my notes on Evernote and telling myself I’m doing some deep thinking here.

I just wrote some new stuff for my Trapper John story, and I guess that was twenty minutes out of the time that I spent messing around on my computer. I guess I’m kind of conflicted about this whole thing because on the one hand, I’m having a mental battle against all these ideas about productivity I put together over the years and on the other hand I spend all this time thinking and then when it’s time to go to work I feel like I wasted my time. I guess I should stop trusting my feelings. Twenty minutes on a story I wrote last year is a good thing if I ever actually publish the damn thing.

I want to stop there and say, is publication the goal, or is making a good story the goal? Well, there is no goal, and if you stop to ask what the goal for everything is, you eventually ask until you get back to the beginning of time and you wonder why we’re all really alive anyway, and that question never makes me feel any better. I’m thinking I should base my life on something arbitrary, like money, say, and leave it at that.

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Williamsburg is a hotbed of highly manipulated botanical installations

In that case, yes, publication is the goal. I will make someone else publish this goddamn story somewhere. I don’t care if it’s the most rinkidink-ass shit you never heard of. If you’ve got any suggestions, let me know.

I changed it so there aren’t any cops in the story, just a mob of people that want this John the Trapper guy dead because he’s clearly weird and a guy has mysteriously died. Marley is a necromancer who is worried what the dead guy, Snoops, will be capable of if he comes back from the dead. It’s all based around the scene at the pub with the cat shit bag delivery.

I don’t know what the market is for this kind of story since I understand nothing about markets. I’m going to change that, though, by God, I’m going to become a goddamn master of the markets. I’m going to be a corporate tycoon. I’m going to sail my skyscraper across the nations, making weird valleys and phantasmagorical ridges as I raze the landscape like a giant, vindictive glacier.

Travel , , 2 Comments

Travelling With Parents

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There’s unnecessary urgency everywhere. That constant push, that arm motion. Come on! Get closer to everyone. We’re going this way. I realize you’re already going this way, but I need to make this motion. Come on! Maybe even pushing you physically. Into an elevator. Into a camera frame. This way! After you, sir! No, after you.

“Which is more stressful,” I ask my cousin, “not knowing what you’re going to be doing in the next five minutes, for almost every five minutes, or…being at work.” He answers, “Not knowing what you’re going to be doing in the next five minutes. I kind of like it.”

But then he’s been here before. Knows what it’s like to follow wealthy people around, to wave the bell hops off with no tip, knowing that they’ll be taken care of at the next room, where the parents are sleeping. He’s lying across two beds at the City Grande hotel in his underwear and nothing else, watching TV and charging his phone without a voltage transformer.

You depend on the parents for everything: the plan, the money, the talking, the ordering, the tipping, the boarding passes, the lying to customs about the corned beef you are bringing home.

When you’re all downstairs in the hotel lobby in Manilla there’s nothing for you to do and there’s nowhere for you to sit and there are spiky potted palm bushes in all the corners and everyone is on edge. Your aunt asks you where your cousin is and you point at him; he’s surrounded by luggage at the front door. She says he needs to pay attention and stick together and everyone needs to pay more attention but it’s impossible after all that travelling to pay attention to anything when it isn’t at all clear what’s happening and you can’t demand answers from anyone because the man is at the front desk putting down hundreds of dollars for your hotel room. So you just stand inside the thorny embrace of a palm bush and hope no one sees you but of course they do and they call you a fool for standing there but you move and you’re run over by a man dressed in all white who’s sneaking around trying to surprise his friend. So you move back.

Then suddenly it’s to the elevators and you leave your luggage there on the carts and there are twenty people on this elevator, we’ll wait for the next one. And then your cousin is pulling you into the elevator bodily saying, come on! You’re white! Because your cousin is sure that you’ll be held for ransom. And then you’re stuck staring at your family with the door closing behind you and not enough room to turn away.

Blogging, The Process , , , 9 Comments

Fred Colton Said What I Was Just Thinking and Now I Feel Better About Myself and Therefore Can Enjoy Life a Little More Than Usual for the Next Five Minutes Barring a Manifestation of the Wrath of God in the Form of a Seemingly Random Tragedy

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 Here’s the link:

http://conceitedcrusade.com/2016/03/15/reload-to-continue/

Check it out. I was going to comment, but I had too much to say, so I’m pulling a Seth Godin move and I’m going to respond on my own blog.

Colton complains that he has nothing new to say and yet he still has to post, so maybe he’ll just talk about what he’s doing right now. Ha! That’s what I do almost every single damn time. I don’t even know why I feel compelled to write shit since I recently proved that I can forget all about commitments to other people real fast. Probably because proving I’m a genius in a world where no one has to listen to you is really tough and if you’re writing something on a blog and people see it every day you can at least fool yourself into thinking that you are proving something.

Colton listens to podcasts by millionaires?! I listen to podcast by millionaires! But I don’t know anyone else who does. One time I listened to Robert Kiyosaki’s podcast. He wrote a bunch of financial education books that I read as a ten year old. Or maybe I was fifteen. Anyway, obviously I didn’t pay attention. Kiyosaki’s podcast is ludicrous! I’m speaking from a place where I’ve listened to one hour long episode, but it was out of fucking control. But you know what, I’ll probably listen to that shit again because, even though Robert Kiyosaki and his bought and paid for friends are as obnoxious as a koala bear who hangs around after you’re done cuddling it and using it to attract sexual partners, that cocky mother fucker is rich as hell! For white nihilistic narcissists there really is no alternative to having a shit ton of disposable income. Sorry, idealistic side of Gordon Flanders. You lose!

I listen to those podcasts to make myself feel like I am accomplishing shit, as opposed to actually accomplishing anything ever, because I don’t know if you tried it but accomplishing something or even talking to someone face to face about accomplishing something is hard.

Everyone is better than me, I am better than everyone else. Totes! Hell yeah I said totes, it’s apparently 2010.

Ha! Colton talks about writing fiction and how it repels blog readers. I don’t know if it’s true all the time, as I don’t have enough traffic to really do any analysis, but god damn! That shit makes perfect sense. Because who’s reading blogs? Writers, that’s who! Why are we all here? Because we want some mother fucking readers to pay us a shit ton so we can continue to write every time we stop drinking. Ok, maybe not all of us. Some of us have simple enough desires not to need more money and some of us are super genius scientists who just enjoy writing and others…well fuck it nevermind. Me and Fred need to be paid. Yeah and so we get on a platform for writers and we think, I’ll write a story so everyone will buy my other story and then other writers are like, I’m sure that’s a great story dude but I’m trying to be productive over here so I need to read blog posts about how to fucking WRITE. Fuck your story. Probably didn’t spend more than ten minutes on that shit anyway.

Colton says he’s sick of rebooting himself and trying new things. Jesus Goddamn Christ when are we going to be the right person already? I don’t fucking know. I’m in the middle of a reboot my damn self. This is day 21. Did you see how many blog posts I put up last week? That’s like my output for a month. Why? Because god damn I’m sick of living with myself! Sometimes I think, just go with the “natural mold,” just really love yourself, you know? And then I lay in bed all day loving myself and then I remember I have student loans to pay and also why don’t I care about the poor and opressed and also why was I born anyway and how come the universe makes perfect sense to Carl Sagan and also why do so many people pretend to be happy in public god damn I hate those fucks. Fuck all that it’s day 21 mother fuckers and I ain’t gonna fuck it up today god damn it.

I’m going to stop there because I could just keep writing all day about this but I want to keep this blog post to a readable length for any potential people who read shit who are looking for a new person to read shit from and found their way here and are now thinking, man if this guy keeps this post brief I’m totally going to become one of his thousand true fans.

And while we’re on the dick sucking train, let me tell you about my favorite podcast, The Crumbcast. There are eleven episodes and somewhere in the beginning of February the creator, Tony Single, wrote a blog post saying everyone should check them out. That’s great, check them out, but if you’ve already done that, why not sign my petition to stop Tony Single’s brutal austerity measures? Together we can destroy Single’s artificial bottleneck and allow the supply of Crumbcasts to reach sustainable levels: https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/moar-crumbcasts.

Haters gonna hate!

Politics , , 2 Comments

Get Another Dollar in America

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Get another dollar in America, why the fuck not. Get another dollar in America, another dollar and another dollar. Get a few dollars together and buy a plot of land in America. Bury yourself in America on a plot of land that you bought, you paid for it, fuck it why not? Get another dollar in America and another dollar and another dollar and pile them on top of one another. Have kids in America. Buy televisions, buy computers, buy comic books and candy canes. Buy things in America. Have Christmas with your family in New Jersey. Go to the Black Hills. Go home and get another dollar in America. Get fucked. Fuck the world. In America. Have another fucking hard time. Get down with the get down. Get the fuck down. Sit down. Stand up and god damn it, why are you doing that? Get to fucking work. Make another dollar in America. Celebrate Christmas with the family. Buy another toy in America. Take another selfie. Suck your own dick in America. Swallow your own tail in America. Get another fucking dollar in America. Buy a ticket to America. Buy something in America. Sell your first name. Get another dollar, fuck it why not.

Journal Type Shits , 10 Comments

Cactus Caterpillar…the Rest is Bullshit

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I picked up a shift today at work to try and stanch the gray green blood from flowing out of my bank account. How do you feel about that word stanch? “Stanch the bleeding” is the cliche.

Tomorrow is my day off, but I guess if someone offered I’d pick that up, too.

I am not writing so I am back in blissful do whatever anything mode. I am still thinking like a writer, though, and recording shit I see on the subways, so, somewhere in between.

I am working a lot on this man’s book, seeming to get nowhere. I have to learn how to create a web site so I can make this pretty complex thing for him and get paid.

I was going to write something better. I can feel my face coming through the back of my head.

So far it has been a good week. It has been terrible weather. It has been slipping and diving. I saw this kid push a full grown Dodge Charger out of the ice today by hisself because I didn’t want to help him. Well I did but then I thought the damn thing would catch some traction and back up right over his crazy ass. That’s when I was going out this morning to get milk for the coffee. We haven’t had milk in the house for four days or so, and I fucking love milk. But we were scraping the inside of the half and half container to lighten up the coffee but then today we didn’t have even enough to scrape. So I went out into the ice. And I got up mad early today at eight o’clock, mostly because my wife is having another heart attack about her paper, but not the same one this is the next one, or the next one, depending on whichever one you are thinking of. I am waiting to go to work to eat, and I’ve had two cups of weird coffee and I started doing pushups again which is probably why I am shaky and cringed up like a cactus caterpillar. That might be the first time I ever typed the word caterpillar.

Ok I’m out of here for now. January was the hot shit when taken from a cumulative standpoint, point of view. My old best friend who I used to dream he was dying in Afghanistan called me the other day and I returned his call yesterday. It was fun but that shit never ends well. We’ll be on the phone for two hours and then I’m like well I have to get to work and it’s dead silence on the other end like damn we ain’t talked in four months and now you going to leave it like this? I can’t fucking win, sometimes we talk for three hours. I think the solution is to call him like once a week, but I can’t look at a phone like that.

Woo fuck.

Journal Type Shits , , , 6 Comments

Man I Wrote a Lot of Words In the Past

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Good morning.

Wow I have been doing this shit for longer than I thought. Writing, I mean. I mean I always feel older than i am, almost always, but I just realized I’m 28 and I’ve been trying seriously to write a novel since I was 19, and that’s if you don’t count all those ones from grade school. And that one in high school. I got pretty far on that one from high school and it was horrible. And the funny thing about that, just thinking about it now, is that I had these really elaborate characters and I spent forty pages bringing them together and then stopped because what the hell were they going to do now? That’s weird, forgot that I even did that shit.

And similarly I forgot that I have been trying to have a successful blog since age 23.

Last night I was reading through my old documents folder looking for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which they used to have on Netflix but then they pulled it and I had to download it. Man I have a shit ton of documents. I have written a million beginnings of stories.

This morning I woke up in a god damned inferno. I turned the heater on last night to like 63 degrees (17 in celsius) and then I woke up this morning and that shit was blasting hot enough to overcome the magnetic repulsion of atomic nuclei.

I didn’t find Cosmos on my computer but I found episode 9 – The Lives of the Stars on youtube. Man that shit is outrageous.

Well, forty minutes here before I have to go to work. I don’t feel sad again, though suddenly I’m broker than I thought I would be. Got paid this morning and it was a lot, 900 dollars, which is about how much I made at the old bartending job, but it wasn’t enough to pay all the bills and still have a comfortable margin. But of course that’s a lot of bullshit, since I put a hundred of it in savings. I never used to save money but I’m old now. Ha, actually I’m ballin out of control compared to those days I was reading about last night. When I was 23, I quit my broke ass no money making job to become a novelist. Yeah seriously! Holy shit what a crazy ass. I didn’t write shit but a lot of angry beta blog rants about how mother fuckers better pay me if they wanted me to keep writing. Hoo! Shit.

Woo and what’s more I ain’t dying out of cancer or incapacitated by tooth pain or incarcerated for reasons beyond my control nor am I in (serious) danger of getting ass raped when I walk out the door this morning. Shit is just about going my way out here.

I know for a lot of ya’ll, the day is half or more over, but enjoy what’s left of it.

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I Forgot to Name This Post

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It feels strange to type on a laptop keyboard now, I’ve been writing from my iPhone for the past few days. I started blogging from my phone out of necessity, and now I think it’s become almost equal to or greater than blogging from the computer. I think it makes me think more about what I’m going to write, without slowing me down as much as writing with pen and paper.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately. I want more people to look at my blog and like my stuff and come back to read, so I don’t want to flood the blog with posts, but then the only thing that seems to raise the number of people who look at the blog is to write more posts. And then I always want to write, but writing in a word processor isn’t enough for me anymore. I want someone to read every god damn thing that comes out of my head.

But I’ve thought it before and I’ll stop thinking it soon and come up with it again in a couple of months: Fuck it, maybe I can get away with publishing every stupid thing I write.

Wife is back to school so that means lots of time at her computer which means lots of unsupervised time for me. I have to get working on my projects for those old guys who want to publish books, but honestly I wish I could give that shit up. I’ve felt very free these past two days, since I told them that I would get back to him in a few days once my friend left.

But I can’t give them up because they may be my key to getting out of waiting tables. If I got two more clients like them I could just stay home and work on their projects. But maybe it would be just as bad as waiting tables.

I started listening to The Self Publishing Podcast today and it was really interesting to hear those guys talk about writing for money. They are very prolific. I feel like I can’t write stories. I feel like if someone were to give me a well thought out story, I could write the scenes, but maybe I couldn’t. Fuck if I know.

Oh that’s another thing, I’ve been making a conscious effort those last few posts to censor my language because I started thinking maybe I could get freshly pressed. It started off motivated by that, and then I found that I could come up with more clear and creative way of expressing myself than cursing. But sometimes that’s just too fucking much to think about.

Hunter Thompson curses a lot in his writing but he doesn’t overdo it, in my opinion. So I think I will try to do that. But then, fuck, I’m always trying to do what other writers would do. I don’t know if I will ever figure it out. But I do know I’m too young and inexperienced to be discouraged about that, even if I’m too old and have seen too much dumb shit to believe anything good about anything.

But yeah, the blog is blowing up! Mostly because I’m engaging with the community like in the early days of last year when I reached 400 views in one month. It’s not much relative to a lot of blogs, but I haven’t been able to get anywhere near that since. I think I posted an average of three times a day that whole month.

Ah I’ve been trying to avoid writing this kind of post and stick to the interesting stuff but I guess I am too excited about writing so much. Writing begets more writing, said someone famous. And then the positive reinforcement that comes when the notifications keep popping up on my phone that someone looked at my blog or commented or liked.

That’s why I was thinking, I forget what I was reading but they were saying if you want to create something new you’ll have to do something you haven’t heard of anyone doing before, which sounds obvious, but it made me think fuck it, if I write enough posts that are interesting to me, maybe I can find enough fans to quit my job and stay home chopping down trees and drinking white lightning and blogging from my phone.

Ha, I’m not really finished writing but I just want to publish this so people can read it while I’m writing the next thing. Fucking ridiculous. I don’t know, maybe I’m a god damn genius.

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Just Need 8 People to Look at This, Thanks

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Ah sheeit tonight had a good night, and now about to go to bed and in six hours or so I will get up and go my ass to Cape Cod. GF and I are going there for just a couple days to chill and celebrate her graduating from culinary school. If the weather is nice, I’ve got a ring and I’m going to propose. Pretty nervous about doing that. I feel like I should do some hot air balloon count of Monte Cristo type shit but I’m just not really that kind of guy and despite all girls being into the big romantic gesture even though they say they’re not, well I guess maybe she’s really not, or anyway I just don’t want it to get cheesy, especially since we’ve been together for seven years. Anyway she really liked Jim and Pam from the office and how he proposed at the gas station in the rain, so maybe something weird will happen like that.

But anyway I didn’t start on here to talk about that. Truthfully I got on here to post something so that I would get a reasonable amount of views today and finish out the stat week strong. If I can get at least eight views today I can finish with an average of ten views this week, and that will make me feel more like a real success in life, or some bullshit, I really don’t understand how I put so much stock into getting ten views when a real blog gets a million or whatever, and when really what is a view, and why is that shit like an endorphin creator. But there you have it, I just wanted to post something so people will look at so I will have a ten view per day average for the week.

I have always liked numbers in a weird way, like stats and how many times I’ve played a song in my iTunes database. I don’t know.

Anyway at the bar tonight it was pretty fucking crazy, but me and my partner handled that shit and made some good money. The worst thing is that I made more this week than I ever have in a week, but I made less last week than I have in a long time, so my two week paycheck will look about even and not reflect that I had a kick ass week.

Oh well, fuck it. I need to watch The Cosmos again, or just plain Cosmos, whatever that Carl Sagan shit is. That’s some real shit. But anyway have a nice couple of days without me.